Signalfire

02, 2010

A previously unknown group of Russian anarchists called “Friends of Freedom” claimed responsibility for the attack on the Russian embassy in the capital of Belarus, Minsk, the Interfax news agency reported on Thursday.

The assailants threw two fire bombs at the Embassy’s backyard Monday night, damaging a car parked there.

The group published a statement on the Internet saying that this was an act of protest against the detention of activists who defended the Khimki forest near Moscow against highway construction.

The website where the statement was posted has been inaccessible since.

Earlier, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko hinted that Russia was behind the bombing of its own embassy.

The Belarus Foreign Ministry called the incident an act of vandalism aimed to undermine Russia-Belarus relations.

August 16, 2010
ORYOL, Russia — Russian prosecutors say a teacher at a Federal Protection Service (FSO) academy heads a neo-Nazi group accused of several violent attacks in the southwestern city of Oryol this summer, RFE/RL’s Russian Service reports.

Viktor Lukonin, a professor in the academy’s physical education department, is suspected of leading a neo-Nazi group that calls itself “the head of groups linked to the Central Black-Earth Region of occupied Russia.”

Lukonin, 31, was fired from the FSO academy on July 29 and was arrested by police on August 8.

Law enforcement officials said today that from July 16 to August 5 the neo-Nazi group attacked several businesses and police stations in Oryol.

An Oryol court is charging the group with at least four crimes, including setting fire to a police station, an explosion at a local prosecutor-general’s office, and an explosion at the cafe Idira, which was owned by people from the North Caucasus.

Yulia Dorofeyeva, an aide in Oryol’s investigation office, told RFE/RL that a probe into the explosion is still ongoing. Four people were injured in the incident.

“Currently we have seven people in jail aged 18-32,” she said. “We have also determined their connections to several other crimes.”

The neo-Nazi group claims on a website to have taken in part in “the destruction of seven police stations, two prosecutor-general’s offices, the destruction of the store Eros, and attacking meetings and stores owned by people from the North Caucasus,” among other incidents.

Kirill Levit, deputy head of the investigation into the case, told RFE/RL that in the basement underneath Lukonin’s garage police found “the makings of a bomb manufacturing workshop” and confiscated two sawed-off shotguns, two pistols, and the components for homemade bombs and four Molotov cocktails.

Levit said the group was “seemingly planning more, increasingly violent attacks” and there are suspicions the group was part of a larger pan-Russian, neo-Nazi organization.

The FSO academy has refused comment on Lukonin.

Dmitry Kraukhin, a human rights activist in Oryol, told RFE/RL the rise of such extremist groups is a result of local authorities’ inability to deal with economic and sociological problems in Oryol in recent years.

“In my opinion it is sparked by too much societal stress, which was actually created by the government,” he said.

Oryol Oblast has one of the lowest standards of living in Russia.

The Oryol neo-Nazi group also claims on its website to be part of the Primorsky Partisans, a group that attacked police stations in Russia’s Far East and is accused of responsibility for the killing of two police officers.

The Oryol group says on its website that “Oryol used to be a quiet provincial town warmed by the sun, but now it is on the brink of complete moral disintegration.”

They blame the change in the city on “people coming from the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as the police and prosecutor general.”

They pledge to carry out more attacks in the future.

The eight alleged members of the neo-Nazi group in police custody face 20 years to life in prison if convicted.

Five hundred Russian anti- government activists attacked the office of a Moscow suburb’s mayor to protest the construction of a highway through a forest, Kommersant reported.

The protesters gathered in central Moscow yesterday and took a commuter train to the northern suburb of Khimki, armed with air guns and baseball bats, the newspaper reported. Police fled after being pelted with rocks and bottles and nobody was arrested, Kommersant said.

The anarchist youths set off flares and tried to chop down the main door of the mayor’s office with an ax, according to Kommersant. They spray-painted “Save the Russian Forest” on the walls of the building in the five-minute flash protest, the newspaper reported.

An environmentalist camp in the Khimki forest was attacked by a group of masked men over the weekend, Kommersant said. Mikhail Beketov, the editor of a local newspaper, was almost beaten to death in 2008 after campaigning to stop construction of a highway through the Khimki forest.

MOSCOW — A court in central Russia has sentenced a neo-Nazi leader to life in jail and imprisoned 13 others for four hate killings and multiple assaults.

The Tver city court said in a statement Tuesday that 22-year-old Dmitry Orlov led a cell of the Russian National Unity, a once-powerful organization that since 1990 has actively advocated white supremacy and Orthodox Christian fundamentalism.

It says the other defendants, including three teenagers, received sentences of between 3 1/2 and 17 years.

In addition to the attacks, the court says, the defendants also owned arms and extremist literature and desecrated Muslim and Jewish cemeteries.

The Kremlin has recently cracked down on ultranationalists amid a spike in ethnic violence and killings of non-Slavs: mostly labor migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Russian police on Friday detained two journalists and 15 protesters at a suburban Moscow forest where they have been living to try to protect the woods from destruction.

The activists and the journalists were taken to the city of Khimki, where a court will decide if they should be arrested or freed, Yaroslav Nikitenko, an activist for the Environmental Defense of Moscow Region organization, said in a telephone interview.

Moscow Region police spokesman Alexei Nikitin was unable to provide a precise number of those detained, citing the lack of records, but said “up to 15 people” were taken to the precinct.

The forest in Khimki has been the focus of controversy for years over plans to chop down much of it for highway construction. Khimki lies on the increasingly jammed route from Moscow to Sheremetyevo International Airport and St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city.

A local newspaper editor who reported extensively on the issue was severely beaten in 2008 and left wheelchair-bound and brain-damaged.

Nikitenko and a dozen other activists have been living in tents in the Khimki forest since last week when a construction company started to fell trees for the new road. The group got the work blocked Tuesday but stayed on spot to prevent further tree felling.

The group says the construction company is not authorized to cut trees in that area.

The activists called the police at the break of dawn on Friday when a group of some 100 young men who had covered their faces blocked the campsite, thus allowing the work to resume, Moscow Regional police said in a statement.

After a regular police squad did not manage to restore order, riot police arrived and grabbed the protesters, Nikitenko said.

Leading environmental groups condemned the crackdown.

Greenpeace said the police actions “show that they have sided with the corrupt officials and their hired bandits.”

The organization called on prosecutors to halt the work in the area to investigate the legality of it and to probe Friday’s detention of activists.

The Russian Union on Journalists called for charges to be brought against the police for unlawful detentions.

Environmental protesters have become increasingly vocal in Russia in the recent years.

Thousands of people took to the streets earlier this year after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed an order to reopen a paper mill on the Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, which is believed to threaten the lake’s estimated 1,500 unique species of plants and animals.

2010-06-10
Moscow – Russia on Thursday captured one of a gang of anti-police youths whose deadly attacks on the security forces in its Far East Region have gripped the public imagination, investigators said.

The authorities have launched a massive manhunt for the gang, accused of killing one police official and wounding three in a series of brutal attacks in the far-flung region bordering China using knives and automatic weapons.

But in a country where the police are deeply unloved, they have still been dubbed by the media as “Robin Hoods”, after the medieval outlaw of English folklore who robbed the rich and gave to the poor.

Over 71% of callers to the Echo of Moscow radio said the attackers were “Robin Hoods” compared to 29% who called them mere bandits, during a phone-in on Wednesday.

“As part of a special operation, police on June 10 detained a member of a criminal gang, suspected of attacking police,” investigators said in a statement.

The gang of at least five men is suspected of three attacks on police, apparently motivated by a grudge against the force.

More than 150 police officials have been deployed in the manhunt in the Far Eastern Primorye region, a local security services source told the RIA Novosti news agency.

Russian television showed helicopters searching the forested region, while police in flak jackets set up road blocks to check cars.

Third attack

In a first attack on May 27, a police official was stabbed to death while on night duty. The attackers then ransacked the rural police station, stealing handcuffs and uniforms.

In the latest attack on Tuesday, the gang fired at two traffic police officials, wounding them. The attackers wore camouflage and wielded automatic weapons, according to Russian media.

The gang is also linked to third attack on a police car on May 29 that left one officer with gun shot wounds to his face.

Several of the gang have military training and one served in Chechnya, sources in the security services were cited by RIA Novosti as saying.

The public support for the gang underlines what critics say is near-daily abuse of office by the police forces, whose officers are regularly accused of violent crime and bribe-taking.

In November, the country’s interior minister even stressed members of the public had the right to use self-defence against abusive police officers.

The father of one of the suspects blamed “the lawlessness of the Russian police” for the attacks, saying his 18-year-old son Roman has been severely beaten by police officers before he fled home.

Suffered

“They are all boys who have suffered at the hands of the police,” Vladimir Savchenko said on Wednesday in a radio interview with the Russian News Service.

He named the police service of the Kirov district.

Media speculated over the reasons for the attacks.

Anonymous letters were sent in April to police, prosecutors, courts and some political parties in the region demanding that top police officials be fired and threatening a “partisan war,” Kommersant reported.

The gang members also appeared to have links to nationalist groups and messages of support for their attacks appeared on far-right web sites. One of the suspects Alexander Sladkikh, 20, is known to be interested in Nazi ideology, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported, citing a local police official.

Two other suspects had been detained by police for beating up foreigners, Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported.

- AFP

Jul 22, 2010

MOSCOW – Militants burst into a hydroelectric plant in Russia’s volatile Caucasus region yesterday in a brazen dawn attack, killing two people and setting the facility ablaze with a string of blasts.

The unknown attackers also bound two plant employees with duct tape before laying mines in the turbine room.

The explosions set off a blaze in the engine room of the station, which is tucked away in a forest in the unrest-hit Kabardino-Balkaria region.

The blasts shut down the plant.

RusHydro, the state-run power group that runs the plant, called the blasts a “terror attack”.

White smoke billowed from the plant and masked security officials were seen outside its premises, according to footage aired on national television.

A regional policeman said “the assailants or their accomplices” briefly attacked a local police building in the town of Baksan, possibly to deflect attention from the later attack.

The authorities are battling a Muslim insurgency in the Caucasus, where Moscow fought two bloody wars against Chechen separatists in the 90s. Militants there have long pledged to destroy key infrastructure sites.

FSB security service chief Alexander Bortnikov told President Dmitry Medvedev that steps had been taken to “increase the protection of strategic sites” after the attack, the Kremlin said.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin urgently convened officials for a meeting, his spokesman said.

Kabardino-Balkaria is part of the Caucasus but has until now seen less of the unrest that characterises the simmering guerilla conflict between Russian forces and Islamist rebels in Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. AFP

18 June 2010
The Moscow Times

Two self-proclaimed “guerrillas” were charged Thursday with attempted murder in connection with a series of attacks on police officers in the Primorye region, RIA-Novosti reported.

The suspects, Vladimir Ilyutikov and Alexander Kovtun, face 12 years to life in prison if convicted of being part of a gang dubbed by the media as “Russian Rambos” for proclaiming vigilante justice against corrupt police.

The suspects surrendered after being trapped in a house by police in the town of Ussuriisk on June 11. Two other suspects committed suicide in the siege, police said.

The gang is thought to have killed two policemen and wounded six others between February and June.

Authorities in the west Siberian town of Mezhdurechensk, where blasts killed at least 66 miners on May 8-9, have vowed to crack down hard on troublemakers at an unsanctioned protest due to take place on Saturday.

On May 14, a demonstration in the town over safety and wages at the Raspadskaya mine resulted in a blockade of a local railway line. Riot police, confronted by stone-throwing protestors, made 28 arrests.

Kemerovo Region governor Aman Tuleyev said no miners were involved in the demonstration and blamed “drunk young people” for starting the trouble.

However, an anonymous source at the Rosuglprof coal worker’s union told the English-language The Moscow News paper that nine miners from the Raspadskaya mine and three workers from other mines were among those detained.

The previously unknown and unregistered Union of Kuzbass Residents has called for new protests across the region on Saturday, including in Mezhdurechensk.

“If anyone again tries to shut down the railway line…all necessary legal means will be employed to maintain calm in the town,” mayor Sergei Shcherbakov told a news conference.

However, while the police presence in the town is noticeable larger, there is as yet no sign of any protestors.

Miners say that they are under intense pressure to ignore warnings of dangerous methane levels in the pits in order to fulfill their quotas, with wages of around $1,300 a month falling by some 30% if they fail to meet production targets.

The already volatile situation in the town looks set to be shaken up even further by the promised visit of “psychic healer” Gregory Grabovoi, released on parole midway through an eight-year jail sentence on Friday.

Grabovoi, who was jailed in 2005 on fraud charges after offering “resurrection services” – including to the mothers of the children killed at the Beslan school siege – has said he will come to the region to look for the 24 miners yet to be located after the blasts.

“If he cons people, we will grab him by the scruff of the neck and chuck him out of here,” the mayor said.

May 17 (Bloomberg) — About 200 Russian riot police were deployed in a Siberian coal town to quell protests over pay and working conditions sparked by one of the deadliest mine accidents since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A dozen buses filled with elite OMON forces from across Siberia ringed the center of Mezhdurechensk in the Kemerovo region today, more than a week after twin explosions destroyed OAO Raspadskaya’s flagship mine, killing 66 and leaving 24 unaccounted for when rescue work was halted May 13.

As many as 3,000 people gathered in the center of Mezhdurechensk, a city of 100,000 on the Trans-Siberian Railway, late on May 14 to demand “fair pay,” Vladimir Chernykh, a retired Raspadskaya employee representing the mine’s 4,000 workers, said in an interview. Some of the protestors were “drunk youngsters” who tried to block traffic on the country’s longest rail link, delaying about 20 trains, said Nadezhda Gulyaeva, a spokeswoman for the local government.

Chernykh said Raspadskaya’s payment system encourages miners to skirt safety rules to meet production targets.

“There are dozens of ways to cheat a methane detector, from making a hole in a ventilation tube to covering it with a wet rag,” Chernykh said at a meeting with authorities and company management today.

Putin, Zubkov

“Whole crews participate in this race for meters and tons to earn the money they need to feed their families and repay loans and mortgages,” Chernykh said.

Miners can earn 40,000 rubles ($1,300) a month if they meet production goals, or 60 percent more than their base pay of 25,000 rubles, company spokeswoman Galina Kovalchuk said. The mine, which accounts for 11 percent of the coal used by Russian steelmakers, may take a year and 5 billion rubles to fully repair, Kemerovo region Governor Aman Tuleyev said.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered an investigation into the accident during a trip to the site May 11, saying the entire industry needs to learn lessons from the disaster and improve working conditions for miners. Putin ordered the government to award the families of each killed worker about 1 million rubles in compensation, an amount Raspadksaya Chief Executive Officer Gennady Kozovoy said the company would match.

First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov is scheduled to arrive in Mezhdurechensk later today to meet with local officials, Raspadskaya executives and miners. Kozovoy told local television channel TM-Kvant that a special commission created to work on the problems raised by miners will hold its first session tomorrow.

“We’re transferring the staff to other mines and want to find work for as many as we can,” Kozovoy said in the interview, which was posted on Youtube.com. “April salaries were paid in full yesterday.”

Investigators are considering several possible causes of the accident, including improper use of mining equipment, human error and malfunctioning machinery, according to the Emergency Ministry. The first of two blasts occurred late on May 8 about 500 meters (1,640 feet) underground and was powerful enough to damage buildings on the surface.

Rubtsovsk, Russian Federation (AHN) – 160 workers in Russia have gone on a hunger strike over not being paid in five months. The workers are all employees at the Altai Tractor Factory.

The group says they have no received any wages since December 2009 and plan on rotating their hunger strike in two groups of 80.

A local Communist party official, Sergei Yurtshenko told Russian media the rotation of the hunger strike allows them to continue their protest indefinitely.

The factory workers in the southern Siberian region of Altai claim to be owed nearly $3.2 million dollars. They also claim their outstanding wages were due to them in March.

Workers said that in addition to the unpaid back wages, the plant has been closed due to a lack of orders.

The workers have also started raising money to buy a plane ticket for President Dmitry Medvedev so that “he could come and see what has happened to the city’s plants and factories.”

The workers feel that Medvedvev has the power to get them paid and thereby end the strike.

Tensions rose on Friday in the west Siberian mining town where at least 66 miners were killed in an accident almost a week ago, with several hundred people protesting against the owners of Raspadskaya mine.

Police said some 300 people took part in the unsanctioned rally in the Kemerovo Region town of Mezhdurechensk. The protesters, mostly miners and their relatives, complained of low wages and lax enforcement of safety regulations.

The city drafted in extra officers to police the rally on the main square, and it passed off without incident.

Two methane blasts hit the Raspadaskaya coal mine near Mezhdurechensk last weekend, killing at least 66 people and leaving some 130 injured. Twenty-four people are still missing underground but high levels of methane gas in the mine has forced the suspension of rescue work for at least a week.

One of the rallying women said that while a miner might get an average monthly wage of 40,000 rubles ($1,300) if production targets are met, his pay would fall to 25,000 rubles ($830 if he fails to fulfill the plan.

A Raspadskaya miner at the protest said workers were forced to breach safety regulations by switching off methane level detectors in order to increase production output.

“We are forced to do this,” he said.

A spokeswoman for the Raspadskaya Coal Company, which owns the mine, said the company’s management was surprised by the protesters’ allegations.

Galina Kovalchuk said wages at the Raspadskaya mine are among the highest in the region, adding that accusations about methane detectors being turned off could only be made by amateurs.

“How can one switch off a detector? It is impossible! This is a computer program. Its feature is that it completely eliminates the human factor,” she said.

The protesters drew up a list of demands, which they took to the Mezhdurechensk city administration building to give to the mayor.

However, a city spokeswoman said there was nothing the mayor could do.

“The mayor has nothing to do with the problems people speak about. These are problems for the owners of the coalmine,” Nadezhda Gulyaeva said.

The high-speed Sapsan train was halted for several hours on Sunday after its power was cut and windshield was broken, in what Russian Railways is calling an act of sabotage.

The Sapsan train, which travels from Moscow to St. Petersburg at 200 kilometers to 250 kilometers per hour, has provoked the outrage of those who live near the railway, many of whom have vented their anger by pelting the passing train with rocks and ice.

A foreign object was hung from the overhead cable that delivers electricity to the train. When a rod connecting the train with the cable ran up against the object, the cable broke loose at high speed and shattered the windshield in the process.

“An act of vandalism is suspected behind the incident. The police are investigating,” a spokeswoman for Russian Railways said, asking not to be identified in line with company policy.

Transportation police confirmed that there was an incident near the village of Leontyevo, in the Tver region, that caused electricity to be cut to the train at 9:32 p.m. Sunday, but said no criminal activity had yet been confirmed.

“An investigation team of eight officers visited the scene and found no signs of criminal activity,” a spokeswoman for the transportation police said, asking not to be identified. She added that the power cable that was torn during the incident was taken for inspection.

Leontyevo has become the epicenter of a popular revolt against the Sapsan. In January, villagers were caught throwing ice and rocks at the train. One of the vandals said he had become outraged after a blast of air caused by the train knocked him off his feet.

Many others, however, are upset that the introduction of the train caused a number of local commuter trains to be canceled, creating huge inconveniences for people of the region.

The vandalism comes after two major terrorist bombings of the Nevsky Express train, which travels along the Moscow-St. Petersburg route: one in August 2007, in which 30 people were injured, and another in November 2009, in which 28 people were killed and 90 were injured.

The incidents have raised concerns that authorities and the railway are not doing enough to provide security.

Russian Railways provides tight surveillance along the 650-kilometer route, but it is hard to track every individual along its length, the company’s spokeswoman said.

Both terrorist attacks and acts of vandalism can be prevented, if proper engineering solutions are introduced, said Mikhail Blinkin, director of research programs at the Scientific Research Institute of Transport and Road Engineering.

In most places throughout the world, high-speed highways and railways are built outside residential areas and are fenced to avoid all kinds of accidents, Blinkin said.

“In this country, they launched a high-speed train to run on a conventional track — the Oktyabrskaya railway. The project came under fire from experts at the time, but no one would even listen.”

A court in Moscow has sentenced nine members of a neo-Nazi skinhead gang to prison terms of up to 23 years.

The gang members, most in their late teens, were found guilty of a string of brutal and very public murders.

The skinheads targeted people of Central Asian origin and posted videos of their attacks on the Internet.

Russia has seen a surge of racially-motivated attacks in recent years. In 2009 alone, neo-Nazis are believed to have killed more than 70 people.

‘Wrong accent’

The nine neo-Nazis called themselves “The White Wolves”.

They sought out Central Asian migrants, and attacked them in Moscow’s back streets.

They clubbed some of their victims to death with wooden planks and killed others by repeatedly stabbing them with knives and screwdrivers.

In one case, a glazier from Kyrgyzstan was stabbed 73 times, as the gang members shouted “Russia for the Russians!” and filmed the murder on their mobile phones.

The jury heard the gang was responsible for at least 11 killings, possibly even more.

And so – after five months of deliberations – came the prison terms: Twenty-three years for the gang leader and up to nine years for the others – the maximum prison term allowed in Russia for underage criminals.

Human rights activists have welcomed the sentencing.

They admit that the police are now cracking down on skinhead gangs.

But even so, last year alone, dozens were killed, and hundreds injured simply for not looking Slavic, and for speaking with a foreign accent.

MOSCOW – RUSSIA’S interior ministry on Wednesday accused journalists of sensationalism and printing ‘lies’ after a magazine alleged that elite riot police had kidnapped migrant workers to use as slave labour.

Media outlets are carrying out a ‘far-reaching informational campaign aimed at discrediting’ the OMON riot police, the ministry said in a statement distributed through the Interfax news agency.

‘Certain representatives of the media in their pursuit of so-called ‘hot stories’ print what they know to be lies,’ ministry spokesman Oleg Yelnikov said in the statement. Yelnikov said he was referring to The New Times, an opposition weekly that has printed two articles about abuse of power in the OMON riot police based on testimony from former and current officers.

The OMON have long been perceived as the elite of Russia’s police force and are known for breaking up opposition protests. In the latest article, published Monday, The New Times alleged OMON police in the Moscow region regularly seized migrant workers and forced them to work on police construction projects without wages, citing a retired officer.

The source for the article, retired dog handler Larisa Krepkova, said riot police had beaten and seized migrant workers who touted for work beside a highway. The workers were forced to carry out building and cleaning work at an OMON base in the Moscow region in 2006 and 2007, alleged Krepkova, who retired from the force in 2008.

Workers were also forced to work on dachas belonging to police chiefs, she alleged, saying she had seen migrant workers at the dacha of deputy interior minister Mikhail Sukhodolsky. The ministry ‘will examine the article for legal violations,’ Sukhodolsky said in a statement posted on the Interior Ministry website Tuesday. — AFP

February 1
The mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, said they were living on the land illegally. But as more and more homes — some stately, some mere shacks — have come tumbling down over the last week and a half, an uncharacteristically fierce backlash has broken out, challenging one of Russia’s most powerful politicians. Politicians, human rights activists, media organizations and even nationalist and anarchist groups have come to the defense of the neighborhood, called Rechnik. Legal or not, these critics say, the demolition operation has crossed the line.

“The methods used to resolve this problem were completely unacceptable,” Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s government-appointed human rights ombudsman, told the Interfax news agency on Thursday. He called on the prosecutor general’s office to investigate what he called “gross violations” of Russian law.

On Monday, residents and their supporters blocked the entrance to the neighborhood, preventing crews from resuming demolitions.

More than a dozen homes have now been destroyed, and Moscow officials have told Russian news agencies that the operation would continue throughout the week.

Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the upper house of Parliament, said the city had “discredited” itself.

“I am personally disturbed by the fact that the Moscow government decided simply to throw these people out on the streets despite the minus-20-degree temperatures,” he wrote on his blog, citing the Celsius equivalent of minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

Even government-run television channels, typically gushing in their coverage of top officials, have focused their cameras on dumbfounded and teary-eyed residents watching the bulldozers tear their homes apart.

Once a charming neighborhood of about 200 single-family homes, a rare sight in a city dominated by hulking apartment blocks, Rechnik has become a battleground in a long-running fight between the government and homeowners over Russia’s ambiguous land laws.

The Soviet government set aside the plot of land on the Moscow River as a gardening collective in the 1950s. Residents claim that Soviet-era permits, which many bought or inherited from the original holders, give them de facto title over the land that their houses stand on. The city says those permits are invalid, and never allowed for the large mansions and quaint cottages that the residents built.

Mr. Luzhkov, who in his 18 years as mayor has not been given to tolerating affronts to his authority, has stood firm. In an interview published Thursday in the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, he called the residents “impostors” squatting on land that he said was zoned to be a park. “These cottages are located in a protected environmental zone,” he said. “The city has been saying for years that construction in this area was forbidden.”

To prove his resolve, he has promised next to send his bulldozers to a luxury housing development neighboring Rechnik, where several government ministers are said to live.

Critics have accused the mayor, whose wife is a billionaire real estate developer, of using ambiguous land laws to acquire prime property and resell it to private interests. Just over a year ago, several dozen similar homes were destroyed in a neighboring community that was in the same nebulous legal situation.

President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who has the authority to remove Mr. Luzhkov, has been silent on the issue, as has Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who appointed the mayor to his current term. After years of threats and legal battles, police officers in black riot gear finally swept into Rechnik around 3 a.m. on Jan. 21, rounding up several dozen residents who had blockaded the entrance with their cars, said Konstantin Shtoiko, one of the residents. “We called the police and they told us that they were conducting a special operation as if we were terrorists in Dagestan,” Mr. Shtoiko, 39, said, referring to the volatile region neighboring Chechnya.

About a dozen homes have been demolished in the last week, and crews began tearing down more on Friday, officials said. Several elderly residents have reportedly been hospitalized with chest pains, as have others who were beaten with nightsticks.

Here is information about the crimes of ultra-rightists and legal actions taken against them in December 2009:

* On December 6, a homemade pipe bomb filled with gunpowder and screws was thrown into the window of the Apostles Cyrill and Methodius Church, near Vladimir State University. A note containing threats against the Orthodox Church was found at the scene of the crime. On December 11, the security services detained a 28-year-old right-wing radical from the neo-pagan society Ros.
* On December 8, five underage neo-Nazis were arrested in Kopeisk (Chelyabinsk Region) for the murder of a 57-year-0ld homeless man.
* On December 11, the serious crimes unit of the  Yaroslavl Region Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation Prosecutor’s Office charged eight neo-Nazis with one count of murder, three counts of attempted murder, one count of arson, and grievous bodily harm. The eight victims of their crimes included not only people with non-Slavic complexions, but also members of youth subcultures.
* On December 11, a homemade shell-less explosive device was detonated in the Kirov District of Petersburg. The bomb, which consisted of approximately sixty grams of ammonium nitrate and a detonating cap, was planted on the recess of a window of an apartment on the first floor of a building at 79, Bulvar Novatorov. The apartment is owned by a retired woman who allegedly rented it to migrants, which apparently was the reason it was targeted by racists.
* On December 11, a group of neo-Nazis torched a Yaposha (“Jap”) chain restaurant in Moscow with Molotov cocktails. In a video they made to promote their crime, the neo-Nazis claimed that the reason for the attack was the fact that Japanese cuisine is alien to our country.
* On December 20, a Vietnamese national was attacked in Petrozavodsk. The victim, Nguyen Ang, was hospitalized in critical condition with severe eye injuries and extensive facial burns. A person unknown shot this 35-year-old man in the head (probably with a flare gun). According to local residents, a large number of neo-Nazi stickers had recently appeared on the entryway of the house where the attack took place.
* On December 20 (Chekists Day), neo-Nazis set fire to the FSB office in the Southwest District of Moscow. A video of the arson appeared on the Internet the following day.
* On December 24, Muslim Abdullayev, a world and European Thai boxing champion, was shot and killed in Moscow. A communique from the neo-Nazi group Russian Shield appeared on Nazi websites in which the gang claimed responsibility for the murder. They backed up their claim with a detail description of the attack.
* On December 24, the trial of three neo-Nazis began in Nizhny Novgorod Region. The defendants are accused of murder, three counts of ethnically motivated attempted murder, aggravated arson, hooliganism, vandalism, and the illegal manufacture and possession of explosive substances. Among their crimes was the arson of the Leninsky District police station, after which they were tracked down and captured. The gang functioned from October 2008 to May 2009.
* On December 25, a well-publicized trial began in Ekaterinburg. The defendants are members of the neo-Nazi gang Volksturm. According to Mikhail Nikitin, head of the Interior Ministry Directorate for Sverdlovsk Region, eighteen members of this gang have been arrested and charged with murder, robbery, and other serious crimes.
* On December 25, Solomon Attengo Gwajio, a 25-year-old Ghanaian national, was taken to Municipal Hospital No. 26 in Petersburg. Medical personnel established that the African had suffered multiple lacerations to the head, neck, chest, stomach, and limbs, and stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, as well as other injuries to neck and limb joints and the left kidney. The man died of his injuries. On December 31, a video of the murder was posted on a neo-Nazi website. It contained a “New Year’s greeting” that welcomed ultra-rightist terrorist attacks all across Russia.
* On December 26, a shell-less, low-yield explosive device was tossed through the window of rented apartment on the first floor of a five-story prefab house at 20, Dachnyi Prospekt in Petersburg. The apartment belongs to a 63-year-old Petersburg woman, who lets it to workers from Tajikistan. A 49-year-old man was in the apartment when the blast took place.

—The January 19 Committee (http://19jan.ru/)

http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/january-19-committee-neo-nazi-terrorism-in-russia-today/

MOSCOW, January 26 (Itar-Tass) — Russia will issue only biometric external passports starting from March 1, says a government resolution posted in the Wednesday issue of the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

“That will bring identification documents of Russian citizens in correspondence with international standards,” the newspaper said.

“Prior to that, Russian citizens had a choice between biometric and regular passports. There will be no such choice now. New external passports will be issued to average citizens starting from March 1, while diplomats and other officers will receive new passports starting from October 1,” the newspaper said.

Holders of average passports will not have to exchange them before the passports’ validity expires.

27 January 2010
A Georgian citizen was found hanged in a police cell in the Moscow region, RIA-Novosti reported Tuesday.

The unemployed man, who had been detained on suspicion of robbery and was not identified, was believed to have committed suicide in the police detention center in the town of Zhukovsky, 30 kilometers southeast of Moscow, the report said, citing the police.

An inquiry has been opened into whether negligence by police officers at the detention center might have allowed the death.

By Sergey Chernov
The recent murder of a Ghanaian man, which appears to be racially motivated, is under investigation in St. Petersburg, while the police prevented two anti-fascist rallies in the center this week.

Solomon Attengo Gwajio, 25, was stabbed to death near his home on Prospekt Veteranov in the southwest of the city at around 9 p.m. on Dec. 25, according to the web site of the prosecutor’s investigative committee.

He was stabbed more than 20 times.

On New Year’s Eve, a video purportedly depicting Gwajio’s murder was uploaded to a web site allegedly run by extreme nationalists. A New Year greeting speech by a masked man standing against the background of the Nazi flag is followed by a poorly lit sequence of two unidentifiable men apparently stabbing the third.

“The investigation is underway, there are no suspects yet,” a spokesman for the prosecutor’s investigative committee in St. Petersburg said on Thursday.

Protests against fascist violence and in memory of the human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova, who were shot to death in Moscow on Jan. 19 last year, were curbed by the authorities this week.

A large painting dedicated to the memory of Markelov and Baburova pasted by an anarchist art group on the brick wall of the Museum of Political History late on Monday was scratched off by unknown people before the museum’s staff arrived at work on Tuesday morning, according to the museum’s press officer.

A group of anarchists and left-wing activists tried to unfold a banner and distribute leaflets near one of the entrances to the city’s central Nevsky Prospekt metro station on Tuesday, but were stopped by plainclothes policemen, who appeared to have known about the planned event in advance. Four activists were detained.

On Wednesday, around 100 anarchists and anti-fascist activists attempted to hold a march on Nevsky, but due to large police presence both at the planned site and on the Petrograd Side, a downscaled version of the march eventually took place on Ulitsa Marata later that day.

A much-publicized anti-fascist rally in Moscow on Jan. 19, which was partly authorized after an initial ban, drew an estimated 1,000. Dozens of detentions were reported.

Activists say the authorities ban and thwart anti-fascist protests because those in power benefit from nationalism.

“We believe that it is the authorities who profit most from fascism, because it divides society and prevents people from trying to solve society’s problems,” anti-fascist activist Olga, who didn’t want her last name to appear in print, said by phone on Thursday.

“Everyone’s attention is therefore refocused on other people, people who aren’t to blame for what is happening in the country. On the contrary, it is precisely our homegrown bureaucrats who are to blame. For some reason, however, the public’s attention is shifted away from real problems to made-up problems like immigration.”

Meanwhile, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko called for measures to fight illegal immigration and for the “more effective” expulsion of those who violate immigration laws. She made the comments while speaking on the board of the City Department of Internal Affairs on Wednesday, Interfax reported.

http://www.times.spb.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=30649

19 January 2010
VIENNA — Nearly one in every three policemen in Russia is likely a psychopath or an alcoholic, the result, a leading specialist says, of the attraction that police service has for such people, the end of psychological screening of applicants, and the sense among many in the service that, as militiamen, they are beyond the reach of the law.

In an interview published in today’s Novaya Izvestia, Mikhail Vinogradov, the director of the Moscow Center for Legal and Psychological Assistance in Extreme Situations, says that as a result of this combination, many unhealthy and even dangerous people are to be found in militia ranks.

Screening applicants is extremely critical, Vinogradov says, and he dismissed the concerns of those who say that if such testing were to be introduced, Russia would have a hard time attracting enough people. That is simply not the case, he continues, because Russia “has significantly more militiamen than life requires.”

Moreover, pay for militiamen, historically extremely low and one of the reasons for the widespread corruption in militia ranks, Vinogradov says, is being increased. And third, when testing did exist at the end of the Soviet period, 30 percent of the militiamen were removed from the ranks, and as a result, “crime in the militia fell sharply.”

Unfortunately, such screening ended in the 1990s. It should be restored, he argues, as should another reform: There should be no special camps for former militiamen. They should be placed in regular prison camps. The threat of that alone, Vinogradov continues, would “restrain very many from committing crimes.”

While most militiamen are honest, the dishonest and sick ones are a threat, even though it is almost impossible for anyone except a psychological specialist to identify the latter with confidence. To deal with them, he argues, not only should the powers that be reintroduce testing, but they should increase the role of the FSB in the militia.

The reason for that, Vinogradov argues, is that all officers of that agency continue to be subject to psychological and psychiatric screening. Consequently, most of those who might engage in the kind of actions that some militiamen do are either denied the chance to serve in the FSB or excluded from its ranks early on.

But testing alone, he acknowledges, is not enough. Too often, militiamen assume that they will not be held accountable regardless of what they do. “Look at how Yevsyukov conducts himself in court. He is threatened with life imprisonment. He killed several people and wounded several more.” “But he is certain,” Vinogradov says, that he will find a way out of what looks to others to be a blind alley.

That sense of being beyond the reach of the law affects not only the militia but also the radical right, according to the parents of Anastasia Baburova, the Novaya Gazeta journalist who was murdered in the streets of Moscow a year ago along with rights activist Stanislav Markelov.

In a statement published in today’s Novaya Gazeta on the eve of the first anniversary of these murders, Baburova’s parents say that those who ordered her murder chose to have it conducted “by day in the center of Moscow in the presence of a multitude of witnesses as a demonstration of their strength, power, and impunity from punishment.”

Saying that “this is Russia, this is Moscow, this is fascism,” the two Baburovs argue that the individual who committed the murder are certain that he will not be given up, and that “you have your own people everywhere.”

“The united ideologues of patriotism and fascism ever more penetrate all strata of Russian society from top to bottom,” they write. “The neo-Nazis are now in the law enforcement organs, in the executive and legislative structures.” And as a result, there is “a real chance” that “fascists will come to power.”

Anastasia Baburova was the granddaughter of two heroes of the fight against German fascism during World War II, her parents say, and that makes it especially tragic that she was killed “in the center of Moscow alongside the Kremlin in peacetime” by neo-Nazis who hated her for her work in exposing them.

The two Baburovs say that however much those who ordered her killing try to hide their tracks, “everything secret will sometime or other become known. And, they warn, “even if your identities are revealed only after your deaths, all the same, eternal shame will be on your heads and on your names.”

29 December
The government has submitted a bill to the State Duma that would boost fines and introduce prison terms for protesters who block roads. Read more…

December 07
Paul Goble
Unlike a decade ago, today’s Russian Neo-Nazis are now a real threat to Russian society and the Russian powers that be, the result both of the evolution of this group and of Moscow’s unsuccessful effort to control them by drawing off some of their membership into quasi-government youth movements, according to a Polish commentator. Read more…

A French documentary has revealed that radioactive materials from nuclear power plants are being stored in containers in a Siberian parking lot. Meanwhile the largest power company in Europe, France’s EDF, which sent the materials there, says it is not responsible. Read more…

Russian police officers committed 2,500 crimes in the first six months of this year, according to the Russian interior ministry.
No, that was not a typing error; I did mean 2,500. Read more…

MOSCOW, July 21 (RIA Novosti) – As from Tuesday, Russian law enforcement agencies have the right to inspect all private letters, parcels and other personal postal deliveries. Read more…

July 6 (Bloomberg) — Russia may face outbreaks of labor unrest last seen in the 1990s as manufacturing slumps at a record pace and companies struggle to pay employees, according to a study by Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. Read more…